Andrew Potter: Who speaks for Canada? Not Trudeau, and maybe no one at all

Regardless of their immediate public health merits, it is surprising just how easily these provincial border checkpoints went up. More worrisome is how little pushback there has been from the prime minister

It is hard to remember what it was like before time froze, but 2020 was already shaping up to be a very bad year on the national unity front. The post-election anger and alienation in the West was still on a slow boil, while the biggest story in February was the #ShutCanadaDown movement, the series of cross-country blockades and protests in support of the Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs who were trying to stop the Coastal GasLink pipeline from pushing through their territory.

And then came the pandemic and everything changed.

Or did it?

Marchers hold demonstration at the Manitoba Law Courts during a march in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs in Winnipeg on Feb. 18, 2020.Glen Dawkins/Postmedia

The conventional wisdom is that times of great international crisis serve to strengthen the power of the federal government. Ottawa came out of the Second World War full of itself, ready to apply its new war-forged capacities to building a national welfare state. The attacks of 9/11 changed and strengthened the federal government in different ways of course, but the underlying rationale is the same: when the outside world is a threat, the country comes together, the central government takes charge.

That was the thesis of a handful of early pandemic newspaper columns, but the reality is more complicated. In fact, what makes the COVID-19 pandemic so different from a conventional war or from international terrorism, is the extent to which it has localized our politics. So much so that far from strengthening the federal government and the cause of national unity, it is starting to look like the pandemic might only accelerate the fracturing of Canada into a very loosely linked collection of provincial quasi-states and regional agglomerations.

The ability of a Canadian citizen to move anywhere in Canada is supposedly a fundamental constitutional right. But in the early days of the pandemic, a number of provinces set up checkpoints or barriers to travel, both inter-provincially and, in the case of at least Ontario and Quebec, intra-provincially. By early April, at least eight provinces and territories had some sort of border checkpoint in place, and for some jurisdictions such as Nunavut, which has had no cases of COVID-19, you can’t get in without first spending two weeks in quarantine.

A Gatineau police officer questions a motorist trying to cross into Quebec from Ontario on April 15, 2020.Jean Levac/Postmedia News

As things stand now, the Atlantic provinces have pretty much locked themselves off from the rest of the country, despite their heavy reliance on summer tourism. New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island have even mused about creating a two-province “bubble” with a common perimeter keeping the rest of Canada at bay.

Some of these measures would probably be considered by the courts reasonable limitations on individual rights during a pandemic. But then, what wouldn’t? The Supreme Court has already upheld as constitutional a ban on the inter-provincial transit of a case of beer on transparently specious “public health” grounds. By this standard, a pandemic probably justifies inter-provincial moats.

Regardless of their immediate public health merits, it is surprising just how easily these barriers went up. More worrisome is how little pushback there has been from the prime minister. For months, Quebec police blocked the inter-provincial bridges joining Ottawa to Gatineau, turning back motorists trying to cross over from Ontario whose travel was not deemed essential. There was no evidence that any of this bothered Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, despite the fact that one quarter of the National Capital Region’s 120,000 public servants work in Gatineau. One wonders whether the member of Parliament for Papineau would be so quiet if the blockades were to be set up in the other direction.

Since mid-March, the COVID-19 pandemic has been a highly localized thing that has required a local response. The time for Ottawa to act broadly and in the national interest was in January or February, when strong decisive actions in areas of clear federal responsibility — closing the border, setting up quarantine, screening at the airports — could have been decisive. Or we can go back even further, and locate Ottawa’s responsibilities in national strategic pandemic planning and personal protective equipment stockpiling.

But once the virus was here, Ottawa became somewhat less useful — in many ways, it has just been getting in the way. And remarkably, the country’s borders still remain too porous for comfort. There is currently a federal quarantine order that requires everyone who arrives in Canada to self-isolate for 14 days, but only British Columbia appears to be taking it seriously. And that province’s officials are getting increasingly exasperated with what they see as lethargic enforcement elsewhere in the country.

The emerging picture is of a Canada where the provinces are doing most of the dirty work fighting the pandemic, while also picking up the slack in areas of federal authority such as airports. Ottawa’s role has been reduced to serving as the national quartermaster, cutting cheques to, quite literally, anyone who asks.

Where all of this ends up, once things are more or less back to normal, is anyone’s guess. But it is worth keeping in mind that there’s no reason to think that the pressure that was building along Confederation’s many fracture lines back in January has evaporated. It will almost certainly reassert itself once again, in the context of a new national order where the provinces are even more emboldened than before, confronting a prime minister who doesn’t seem to care.

Back in the days of the mega constitutional debates that roiled the country for close to three decades, a recurring question was: who speaks for Canada? The answer, in the uncertain age of post-pandemic federalism, might well be no one.

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